I went to a state school as an undergrad that no one cares about and had a great time. Went to an ivy for my grad school and had a good time too.
I am eternally thankful that I did not have to pay a dime for my education. A close family member just finished paying off $97K in student debt. This person is 45 years old and a professor at a state school.
That said, if you have money earmarked for your kids and willing to play the game, then go for it. This is a free country. Just make sure your kids are ok with it too.
2 Likes
If 35% of graduated students are in distress then that’s not a great outcome by any measure. Sorry, I have to disagree. Cost matters.
Thanks - makes sense. $39K on average. Scares the crap out of me - glad my kids are fortunate enough to have $0.
1 Like
Sorry, I did not mean to offend you. Your explanation that you were a commuter , which you did not mention earlier, is helpful.
1 Like
Blame goes to anyone who bought something they could not afford - you can survive on Choice meat or Outback.
You don’t need to buy Prime meat, or Flemings - unless you have the wherewithall to do it.
I suppose it’s setting up for the rich to enjoy the higher expense school (short of need/merit aid) - and while it may not be fair, that’s how it should be - IMHO.
Live within your means. Everyone has the means - or many have the means - to afford what they buy -but too many can’t and there are financiers there to help them make these tragic mistakes.
Don’t forget - college, for most, costs more than they say.
1 Like
Thank you to your family member for being responsible and not stiffing fellow citizens.
1 Like
Cost definitely matters if you’re taking loans. No argument there. But we are in the fortunate position of being able to pay for whatever schools they choose. I don’t want them to have to make a cost-based decision like I did unless it’s what they want. This is what I have worked for.
12 Likes
Yes, I absolutely understand that this is the concern and that upper middle-class families would not want their chances for merit aid to be reduced in favor of actual middle-class families. I get that but in my opinion (and I know many on this board would disagree with me), it is deeply problematic that a family with a household income of 50 or 90K (pre-tax) is competing for a limited pot of merit aid with families that make 200K or 400K. I am perfectly willing to believe that the 400K family in a high COLA might struggle to pay for college, but I just don’t think they will be struggling as much as the 75K family.
While my own child got great financial aid packages, I suspect it is because she was accepted at the handful of schools that are able (willing?) to give robust need based aid to middle-class families. I believe my family is middle-class by most people’s standards. Certainly we fall into the above range. Yet when we ran the net price calculator at the schools on her original list, the results for need based aid ranged from a family contribution of $3500 to a family contribution of nearly 23000 (at an in-state school!). Some of that discrepancy was becuase the most generous schools do not expect students to take out loans, but even if my daughter had to borrow, that is an enormous difference. Basically some colleges gap middle-class families and others do not. I am suggesting that if schools have to choose between giving their merit dollars to affluent families or giving their merit dollars to middle-class families, they should choose the middle-class families. OR they should stop gapping the need based aid given to middle-class families BEFORE they even start handing out merit scholarships. And yeah, that choice would make affluent families upset.
Also, I have not done much research on this subject, but my understanding is that it is not that some schools which used to give merit aid have gotten rid of their scholarships and now only give needs-based aid. My impression is that more schools have moved in the opposite direction --that is schools which only gave need based aid 15 or 20 years ago have diverted some of their financial aid funds to merit scholarships in order to entice the affluent students that they would like but who don’t want to (are unable to?) pay sticker price. The outcome is that a lower proportion of their financial assistance goes to poor and middle class students at those schools.
3 Likes
I went to a state flagship and commuted, as I lived with my spouse. I too made lifelong friends.
From what I have seen, it’s the opposite. As schools become more selective, they have moved towards need-based aid and away from merit. Anecdotally, that’s been the case with schools on my kids’ lists.
It seems to be a more general trend from this article:
6 Likes
I agree with many of the points that you are making, but in my experience (and also that of some of my children’s classmates), students who live in such households do get Pell grants. I think that you are hitting the nail on the head when you talk about the role of assets. I do save very very aggressively, more than most wealthier people that I know. But almost every penny that I save goes into retirement funds as opposed to other types of savings or home ownership. I suspect that my non-retirement assets are quite low compared to many middle-class property owners. On the other hand, when I retire who knows whether I will still be able to afford rent on my current apartment (or any apartment) so I am sure that people who purchased homes will be much better off than me. My hope is that my retirement distributions + whatever is left of social security will cover basic rent and food. That’s the plan. If it doesn’t work out, hopefully at least one of my children will take pity on me and let me live in their basement or attic. They are all likely to be ridiculously overly-educated thanks to me so fingers-crossed that at least one of them will also be kind or at least grateful.
4 Likes
You may be right, but I think that this is a new trend after years of growth in merit aid. I am pretty sure that the growth in merit aid over the previous decade or two is part of what Ron Lieber was arguing about in The Price You Pay for College( or some other currently popular college book). Thus maybe the trend is finally reversing in the last five years? Also, the poster that I was replying to was talking about “top 30-40” schools having gotten rid of merit scholarships. I think most “elite” colleges never had merit aid to begin with so I don’t think that they have been getting rid of those scholarships lately; they just never had them. But I fully admit that my info is not even anecdotal like yours. It is really just based on what the college advisors at my kids’ schools claim with some light skimming of magazine articles and newspaper articles thrown in. So I am making guesses without real research on the topic. Maybe some data loving posters will actually know the answer to this one.
1 Like
Trying not to venture down the road of politics but higher education gets much less funding from local/state/federal than it did once upon a time.
Most of the schools ‘gapping’ accepted students aren’t hoarding money - they literally don’t have it to give. It is often the question of finding students who are able to pay more of the overall cost (even with a merit scholarship) or trying to fund students who cannot bring any money beyond their Pell Grant and Stafford loans.
Schools need to balance their budgets; collectively as a society we currently have decided not to look at higher education as a common good to be heavily supported by state funding. That is a choice that leads to colleges and universities looking at how each individual student will be able to fund their own education…and the biggest driver of completion is being able to afford to stay in school.
While I think it would be lovely if all schools had the resources to fully fund all students capable of attending school - that just isn’t the reality. Most colleges are being asked to do more with ever fewer resources (I am NOT talking about the colleges with enormous endowments…those are a drop in the higherEd bucket). A school that offers a $10-$20K discount on their $70k COA can get $50-$60K for each student coming on a merit scholarship, versus trying to fund $70k per student who has full-need.
For each $70k of school money, they can either have no revenue while funding 1 student or $210k - $420k per every 4-7 students accepting a merit scholarship to attend. This, like so much in our society, is a numbers/money issue - most schools don’t have the budget required to make it a values issue.
14 Likes
good for you!
The whole point of merit aid is that is doesn’t take need into account. They don’t divert it to high income students, they simple don’t take income into account. Everyone is considered based on MERIT, including students with very high need who will get full financial aid anyway.
As a full pay family, I 100% support merit aid (based on merit)-- my oldest D has some merit aid at a T20 LAC. As a former lower middle class student who couldn’t get financial aid due to a non-custodial parent’s income, I still benefitting from merit aid and couldn’t have attended college without it. I do agree the middle class falls through the cracks, and generally end up at public in-state as a result.
4 Likes
The whole point of merit aid is that the AO looks at all applicants and judges their application and offers a scholarship WITHOUT taking income into consideration
You seem to be against this and believe scholarships should not be awarded to students whose family income you judge to high. about 90k?
Again Merit does not take into account income.
It seems you want the elimination of all merit and only have need based aid, a two tier need based aid system with traditional need based aid plus additional need base aid for the best applicants below a certain income level.
So it looks like you did a great job at researching your Daughters schools running the NPC and getting an idea of your family contribution and finding schools with very low COA for you.
Now, finding a $3500 COA school on your daughters list shows me that the system did work very well for you, a middle class family.
This is the exact same thing we tried to do but looking at schools that offer merit aid.
4 Likes
Yes, the system worked very well for my daughter. I have no complaints about my family’s experience. However, my post was specifically in response to a poster saying that middle-class students must apply to a large number of colleges in order to get merit aid. The poster also named the range of incomes that they consider middle-class as 40K-90K for a household of 4 and said that their income was in that range and that they were not eligible for need-based aid. I did not define 90K as the top figure to be considered middle-class. The original poster did.
Nevertheless, however, you define that range, I personally think middle-class students should be eligible for needs-based aid. But apparently (according to the original posters), many middle-class families are shut out of any meaningful needs-based and thus they are scrambling to be able to afford most 4 year college. So yes, I am saying exactly what you think. I am saying that if the choice is between helping middle class students afford college and giving any aid to affluent students then I believe the priority should be middle-class students. Yes it is a values issue. But we can agree to disagree on that value (prioritizing helping families with middle incomes over families with higher incomes). Disagreeing about that value is OK. As far as I can tell, we aren’t really disagreeing about the content of what I wrote or about the definition of merit aid vs. needs-based aid or even about who is middle-class and who isn’t. I am pretty sure that we are disagreeing about who we each think is more important to fund. You seem to think wealthy families should be on an equal playing ground in competing for merit scholarships. I don’t. I believe that if a middle-class family is not eligible for needs-based aid then it is more important to find a solution to help that family than it is to offer scholarships that are open to wealthy people.
Thus, I am far less interested in debating my values (our actual point of disagreement) than I am in the question of how to make college more affordable to middle-class families. That is the question that I would love to answer, particularly through the lens of whether EA helps or hinders affordability for those kids since that is the main topic in this thread. SCEA/REA definitely helped in our case, but very few students are admitted through those programs. If it is true that most of the schools that offer meaningful needs-based aid to middle-class families also have single-digit acceptance rates then that is not a viable solution to my overall concern even if it worked out just fine for our family.
3 Likes
The way to make college more affordable to middle class families is to more heavily subsidize colleges that commit to making themselves more affordable to middle class families.
That would require massive buy-in to the belief that college is a common good that the community/state should invest in heavily. Right now, there isn’t money at most colleges to provide need based aid to everyone who needs it. The need-based aid most often given is given to the poorest students (as it should be, and I would hope you would agree with this given the previous statements of how money should be allocated).
Even with the poorest students receiving the most need based aid…they aren’t being given enough aid to afford college. They, too, are gapped by schools that just don’t have the money.
EA doesn’t have squat to do with the fact that you can’t get money out of a stone. EA isn’t why students can’t afford to go to college.
15 Likes
And to add to Beebee’s excellent post- the insanity that a low income kid, even with full Pell and whatever aid the public U system can come up-- cannot afford the state’s own public U’s- that’s the real tragedy, not that someone’s nephew got waitlisted at Case because they practice yield management.
Low income people pay state taxes-- right out of their paycheck, just like middle income folks. They pay sales taxes- a VERY regressive form of taxation, because the 6% or 8% they are paying on top of the price of a pair of sneakers for their kid hurts them more than it does a wealthier family. They pay more state taxes every time they fill up their car.
But they cannot afford the state schools in many parts of the country.
21 Likes
Yes, I think the focus from a policy standpoint should be on public schools.
Private colleges shouldn’t be subsidized at all in my opinion unless it is for some type of public research. These funds should flow to public colleges. These colleges are already subsidized by state tax payers and there should be a mandate on those colleges being for in state students (which there already is to some degree due to cost differences and I know some state public’s already have a stated policy like this).
College costs also have become inflated by other factors: lack of good trade schools, other amenities that are not needed for the learning process, college athletics (I understand football is a revenue producer at many larger colleges), tenure/huge run up in professor and higher level administrative salaries plus probably more that I am not thinking about.
The system for paying for college is very progressive. The problem is the extreme cost of college not the fairness per se in my opinion.
2 Likes